galley kitchen on the right. “And here’s my room. Under construction.”
I leaned against the doorway and looked in. The dresser was still shoved against an unpainted wall, but the bed had been pushed to the center of the room and piled up with pillows and a white duvet. Blue painter’s tape lined the carpet where it met the walls. The light was off, but the room was bright from the sunshine coming in through the blinds.
“Not a lot of personality to it yet,” she said. “The landlord paid for the paint, but said it had to be white. I’ve got all my posters in the closet. Maybe I’ll call you when it’s done. I can do better than this,
I laughed at the way she said that. It summed up my thoughts exactly, but on a different subject. She shot me a quizzical look. And then I did the natural thing—the thing that came naturally because I’d rehearsed it in my mind a thousand times in the past few months. I laced my fingers into her hair and went in to kiss her.
She kissed me back. The way her mouth tasted put a lonesome ache in the pit of my stomach from the familiarity of it, from how far away the memory seemed. But that passed quickly, and the excitement of being there with her ramped up second by second. Time had taken a U-turn, at long last admitting it had gone way off the fucking highway, and now I could whiz past all my mistakes and regrets and the specific moments when I became more and more of an asshole and into my sublime original life, which began with the beautiful girl who singled me out to kiss her in the quarry lake. Me above all the others.
I held her face in both hands and leaned back against the door frame. She slid her palms up my stomach to my chest. Every nerve along their path flared on like a gas burner. I knew it was wrong to do this to Jill. She was my wife, the mother of my son, who was the only decent thing my life had to show for itself, and my regrets and mistakes weren’t her fault. I knew I ought to stop, but I didn’t want to stop. I tried pelting my guilt with a dozen justifications. It didn’t count if it was a girl I had been with years before Jill ever came along. It didn’t count because I was just horny, and in that sense it wasn’t personal against Jill but strictly biological. And it didn’t count when the girl was the one Elias had loved, and I had appointed myself Elias’s proxy on earth. In fact, this would be the first time it had
But I knew every bit of that was a lie. It counted. Not only did it count, but it was the biggest fuck-you I could give to Jill, because I’d had plenty of chances to walk myself through this scenario in my head and end up choosing the right. And even as I kissed Piper I knew the thing that tempted me most was the opportunity to shake off the embarrassment of my former ineptitude and pleasure the hell out of her, so she’d remember that instead. Even in my compromised state I could perceive what a jackass I was to think that. Jill had taken enough hits for my ego already. She didn’t need to take Piper’s hits, too.
The challenge was to get my body to cooperate with the ruling of my brain. Piper was murmuring in my ear that she had missed me, how much she loved my body, how much she loved it in really specific ways, and when she felt my erection with one hand and undid my belt with the other one, I knew I couldn’t stop but that I had to.
I set my hands against her upper arms and pushed her back gently. Her face got that perplexed look again, and so very deliberately I buckled my belt, checked my zipper, pursed my lips and exhaled slowly.
“I’d love to,” I told her, “but I really can’t. I can’t.”
She blinked once and looked away, toward the window. Her long throat caught the light. Shadows played against the tendons, fell into the small hollows at the base. “See you around, then,” she said.
“Don’t be mad. It isn’t personal. I got married, Piper.”
She nodded. “Then you’re a giant asshole.”
I tried to laugh, but it came out as a hard sigh. “Believe me, nobody knows that better than I do.”
The night I drove down to D.C. with Dodge, I put TJ to bed before I left and watched him for a long time. Elias always said he looked like me, and there in the dark, with his face all serious, I could definitely see it. He had the same type of hair I had as a kid, the really shiny kind of blond that means your mother’s always touching your head to check if it’s greasy. His first birthday was coming up, and he was right on the verge of walking. When Jill let him down from his high chair and set him on the rug, he’d pull up on Elias’s chair and stand there holding on with one hand, the other one out like a little wing, looking as if he was making up his mind about whether it was worth his time to take a step forward. Jill kept saying we needed to get him a new bed, that it wouldn’t be safe to let him sleep in the laundry basket any longer, but I kept procrastinating because I knew the truth. I wasn’t going to be there for the next stage with him. I wanted his baby days to be like a closed room or the inside of an egg. Whatever was beyond it, I couldn’t think about that.
Once he was sound asleep I grabbed my messenger bag and went out to the truck where Dodge was waiting. On my way out I heard Jill moving around in the kitchen, talking to Scooter, whom Dodge had assigned to the night watch. I didn’t say goodbye or anything. I tossed the bag onto the seat behind me, and Dodge said, “Easy,” and then he backed out of the driveway and we were off.
It’s hard to describe how freeing it felt at first. We drove past the turnoff to the quarry, past the empty lot strewn with bricks that had once been the house where I lost my virginity, past the fruit stand and the hill where Piper’s house stood. The road took us by the motel in Liberty Gorge that had been sanding down my soul for the past year and a half, and through Henderson, where the hardware store’s security lights glowed through the old windows. I was like a comet flying past these things, burning through all of it on a singular path. It wasn’t until we crossed the border into Massachusetts that the shallow exhilaration wore off. I started getting restless, and thinking about too many things, until finally I took the wheel from Dodge so I’d have something else to focus on. He fell asleep as if it was nothing, and I drove for hours and hours and hours.
Here’s what was in my messenger bag, sitting on that seat right behind him. A couple of crumpled brochures from Bylina’s last campaign. A package of mints, kind of grubby at this point, left over from that same time period. Five letters, stamped and addressed, to the
It was dawn when I merged onto the New Jersey Turnpike. The sky was streaked pink and orange, but my eyes had gotten so bleary by that point that it was all running together like a wet painting. I pulled into the first rest stop to take a leak and buy some Red Bull. In the men’s room there was this guy helping his kid change clothes—I guess the kid had spilled a drink on himself or gotten carsick or something—and the boy was crying and crying, just beside himself, standing there in his shirt and socks and a pair of diapers. You could tell he was exhausted. The dad was talking to him real softly, saying things like “One-two-three!” as he lifted the kid’s shirt over his head, wiping down his chest with a wet paper towel. That about killed me to watch. I couldn’t pee fast enough. I hated thinking about how I was never going to be there for TJ like that, hated it like death. The thought crept into my mind then:
Just outside the D.C. line we stopped at a Starbucks and I ran in to change clothes in the bathroom. Starbucks always has these big single-toilet bathrooms, no stalls, so you can lock the door and get all that space to yourself. I ruffled up the front of my hair a little bit, left a collar button undone, tried to look the way I always did. Casual but polished. It made people comfortable. As I smoothed on some aftershave I looked at my reflection in the mirror over the sink and tried to psych myself up a little.
First we drove down to the National Mall and Dodge dropped me off at the curb. I had my messenger bag with me and also a plastic shopping bag, in which was a box containing one of the pipe bombs I’d built. It was a crappy little thing and chances were fair that it wouldn’t even go off. I didn’t care, since the object of it was to draw every emergency vehicle and cop in the city to this one little corner, not to be the big event. I jogged down the stairs into the Metro station, left the box next to a bench, then jumped on the train to Union Station. All over every